Boku no Hero Academia (My Hero Academia)

One day, a four-year-old boy came to a sudden realization: the world is not fair. Eighty percent of the world's population wield special abilities, known as "quirks," which have given many the power to make their childhood dreams of becoming a superhero a reality. Unfortunately, Izuku Midoriya was one of the few born without a quirk, suffering from discrimination because of it. Yet, he refuses to give up on his dream of becoming a hero; determined to do the impossible, Izuku sets his sights on the elite hero training academy, UA High.

However, everything changes after a chance meeting with the number one hero and Izuku's idol, All Might. Discovering that his dream is not a dead end, the powerless boy undergoes special training, working harder than ever before. Eventually, this leads to him inheriting All Might's power, and with his newfound abilities, gets into his school of choice, beginning his grueling journey to become the successor of the best hero on the planet.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Boku no Hero Academia ranked eighth in the 8th Manga Taisho Awards and fifth in the 2016 Kono Manga ga Sugoi! for the male readers division.

The series has been published in English as My Hero Academia by VIZ Media under the Shonen Jump imprint since August 4, 2015. It was also simulpub through MANGA Plus. Boku no Hero Academia has been published in Italian by Star Comics since February 3, 2016; in French by Ki-oon since April 14, 2016; in German by Carlsen since July 26, 2016; in Spanish by Planeta Comic since October 2016, in Brazilian Portuguese by Editora JBC; in Turkish by Gerekli Şeyler since March 2017; in Indonesia by m&c! since October 4, 2017. It has been licensed in Polish by Waneko.

A video game titled Boku no Hero Academia: Battle for All has been released for the Nintendo 3DS in Japan on May 19, 2016. Another video game, titled Boku no Hero Academia: One's Justice, was released in 2018 for Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC.

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Characters

Todoroki, Shouto

Main

Midoriya, Izuku

Main

Bakugou, Katsuki

Main

All Might

Main

Uraraka, Ochako

Main

Aizawa, Shouta

Supporting

Kirishima, Eijirou

Supporting

Toga, Himiko

Supporting

Dabi

Supporting

Asui, Tsuyu

Supporting

Reviews

Aug 31, 2024

bergars

Recommended

It's been a trip, hasn't it?

I won't talk about it in hyperbole, but it's done. A big piece of the modern manga landscape, be it famous, or infamous. It got people talking about anime, and it got new people into anime, while making the weird crowd get into anime a little too much. We all know, and how about we objectively talk about it?

“My Hero Academia” started out with a lesson to tell. “The only thing stopping you from achieving your dreams, is you”. And it went on to tell us about that message, about how a kid strived to become the best of the ... best, with no powers, in a world governed by powers. It sounds extremely fun, simple, while touching upon the wholesome aspects of youth, growth, kick-ass action, beautiful art, and paneling. But, there's something with long-running manga that always sticks out. Does it maintain the quality from beginning to end? Hard to say.

As a whole, it's a manga that's got an objective, and it always heads towards it. “Be the best hero” for Deku, our titular, powerless kid. We can't forget the brilliant villain, Shigaraki, the foil for such an ideology. Given powers that are too destructive to be considered a hero, he reveals the darker aspects of the society. After the reveal of such flaws, he goes on to enact his hatred for how the world treated him, and those similar. A hero to the sad ones, an icon for the tragedies.

We've got a great villain, we've got an incredible cast of heroes and a believable protagonist we root for. And, did it all go wrong at some point? No, it actually didn't. It just couldn't hold its weight.

Manga can get too big, the stakes can get too high, and something that's glaringly obvious here is how much a weekly schedule destroys one's ability to make everything perfect. How can one bring 400+ chapters to a close with perfection?

If we go by arcs, just like my rating, it all maintained a good 9 out of 10. A beautiful bar for characters I love, action I enjoyed, and story beats that we couldn't stop reading. One or two I didn't care much about, but still a solid 6 to 7 out of 10. The problem came entirely when making a coherent finale.

No spoilers, the final arc chose safety over boldness. It didn't pick the brutal choices, it went with the baseline of what was okay. It couldn't pick a side between real, and overly safe, even if BEFORE it went the extra mile to go against the comfort of the audience. Big moments? Let's backpedal, we can't do that. “HOLY GOD, WILL THAT ACTUALLY HAPPEN”, no, it doesn't. “I'm going to cry, this happened”, sike, it didn't. Many choices the author did, felt like shock value, only to reverse them, and at the 95% of everything, I basically dropped it.

As I came back to finish it, it did improve in quality, with the many mistakes it already did. Damage done, and the perception from the public ends in how “we really can't have perfect endings, can we?”. This is a sad 8/10, since it could've been one of the greatest manga endings in recent memory.

It ends with a cliché, one that ruins the great perception we had of our protagonist. Whatever was established at the beginning, is contradicted in favor of an idea that on paper sounds nice, and wholesome. However, if thought about for more than 4 minutes, it turns the whole thing sour.

I don't hate the manga, and I don't hate the ending, but I know it was mishandled. Do I blame the author? Not at all, hell, I blame the magazine more than that. The time constrains, the terrible state the author was in for quite a while, and his many breaks serve as evidence. He was in taters, with a fan perception that had him by the neck, and he still delivered a half-decent ending, that could've been wonderful, if given the time, and healthcare.

It's another one of those things we can't help. Even still, I'll always look back at how great most of the manga was. Yes, a bad ending can ruin many people's perception of the story, but it was still, and will always be, amazing. Even if the ending wasn't.

8/10. Could've been an absolute 10. Recommended? Yes, you're still getting a proper ending, and that's more than can be said for many other manga.

For me, this is a proper goodbye, to “My Hero Academia”. The end of one of the big New Generation. Into the new, new generation.

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Aug 21, 2024

Kreikka95

Mixed Feelings

I loved this manga so so much while it was being published. It was an amazing distractor for the dark times of 2020 and 2021, all until Stars and Stripes showed up I think. And then the non time-skip happened (it was way to damn short to be called a time-skip imo) and the story lost me almost completely. Ever since the time-skip reading this story felt like a chore more than an enjoyable thing like before.

I have my gripes with this story, a bunch of them really. The way the author decided to progress the story truly disappointed me. At the beginning it ...

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Aug 6, 2024

Paulo_One720

Not Recommended

How can I start, it is a typical action-adventure shonen, that starts showing us a world that is not usually seen in animes, which I liked, however, the story is very childish and does not bring any emotion to the reader, though the artist tried to spicy it up on the last few volumes, it was not enough to make it a good story. But the worst part is the end, I do not wish to spoiler, but as someone who grew up watching BNH, I'm afraid to say that I'm more disappointed with this end than with Fairy Tail end, the character development is ...

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